Kirjastalon Salissa
I've six hundred fifty books in this room,
And how many have I read? Well, not all of them,
There's some I think I'll never get around to-
and some I've read, but didn't understand.
Oh, of course I love all of them. Some more than others.
And all of them have loved me back- mathematics with its truth,
The languages with beauty, the literature with truth, again,
But of a different sort- of course, of course.
And so far only one has rejected me,
My love for it is forever unrequited.
Not much I can do about that.
Pull up a chair, old boy. A bar of Fazer?
A box of salmiakki, bitter as the tale?
I'm but a schoolboy, but my heart still aches for it...
It said- its words were cruel and soulless, raw and bare-
Kaksitellen ja kolmitellen heitä
Verkalleen, asteli rantamäkeä
Ylös, välistä useampikin...
Oh, anteeksi- etkö ymmärrä?
Tuo on ongelma. Mutta minä-
Mä en ymmärrä koskaan,
Ei nyt, ei huomenna. Till I die
It mocks me with the beauty of its tongue,
Its words are soft and lilting- clear as ice,
Opaque as pitch, soft as fur and hard as iron...
I pick it up, time now and time again,
A quest as futile and as slow as picking up the pipe from a mantelpiece,
And if that was seventy pages, this would take seventy thousand.
A word jumps, here and there.
I don't know what it's doing,
Only that in a mass of foreign nonsense
It chose to make its home- aika, unohtaa,
Missä, kirja, kiitos paljon-ei,
Rakkaus.
I cannot learn again the ä's and ö's,
The double vowels, rolling r's forsaken...
I was voted out.
Nilsen...Nilsen...Nilsen...Nilsen...Nilsen...
Voted out- it's not the cruel one, in the end...
I keep it still. But I can never love it.
I've six hundred forty nine books in this room...